I’ll get to commenting point by point later on, but for right now, let me start out on a different tack: a few thoughts about someone you could really rassle with: Bart Ehrman.
You may well know about him, but in case you don’t, he started off 30 years ago as a young, brilliant, earnest lover and teacher of Scripture who studied at Moody and Wheaton, and got his doctorate at Princeton under one of the finest Biblical scholars in America, Bruce Metzger. Sincerely devoted to God’s Truth, and very much a conservative Evangelical. But Ehrman had a problem. He had this very pure and focused drive to discern the absolute truth of Scripture, and the more he learned, the more he saw with his own eyes that the vagaries of human influence are stamped all over every page of it.
There are many serious difficulties in the field of textual criticism, as all Biblical scholars know.. There’s the actual physical provision of a given manuscript itself: Where did it come from? Says who? What were the sources? How was it written? Was it edited? Re-written? How many times? When? And why? And --- There are strictly irresolvable difficulties in the translation of obscure or incomplete passages. --- There are variant texts that can't be harmonized. --- There are NT books for which evidence points to deliberate false attribution, which is to say, forgery ---forgery in the Biblical books themselves ---- and on and on.
Now, Ehrman is apparently a man of considerable intellectual purity. He felt violated when he saw historic discrepancies, lacunae in the genealogies, messy matters.(An example: one thing that blew his mind early on was that Jesus said that David entered into the Temple when Abiathar was High Priest but the Book of Samuel says it was when Ahimelech was High Priest. Shock. One of them must have been wrong).
Ehrman, possessed of the gift of moral indignation, decided it all needed to be forthrightly faced and exposed. He started cataloguing all of the contradictions and inconsistencies, the accounts that don’t match, the travels that don’t map, the morals, maxims and laws that violate each other, and especially the words, the thousands of words that mismatch from text to text. He ended up being the kind of Bible-Debunker who gets on all the talk shows: good grief, they sure love him at NPR. He’s scholarly, but he writes popularly. The titles of his four New York Times bestsellers outline his argument: “Misquoting Jesus,” “Jesus, Interrupted,” “God's Problem,” and “Forged”. Not retired yet, he’s still, as far as I know, scandalizing seminarians from sea to shining sea with all the human chaff and scribble found in the Biblical granary of the Word.
I think that in many details he is right, but overall, he is wrong. He is wrong to have this debunking, “if-God-is-God-this-can’t-be-so” attitude. But I feel for him. This is what happens when you start out thinking that the things of God should be Uranium-isotopic-separation pure, and you find there are things that are not pristine and can’t be re-pristinated.
The Bible is the Word of God in the words of men, and that means, yup, the leaven of human influence is all through it. My friend, that does not bother me. Bart Ehrman is a deeply bothered man, but Bart Ehrman does not bother me. Why? Because I am beginning to grasp that God’s Majesty is permeating all these human things, to make His glory known. The Holy Spirit inspires men because He penetrates the ways of men: “The Kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and buried in three measures of flour, until all of it was leavened.”
He --- Our Lord the Holy Spirit --- is doing this thing perfectly, and His perfect way is to do it through frail humankind, exposed to all the vagaries of purpose and chance, psychology and history. He uses chance to His purpose.
That is my overall paradigm.
The history of the Catholic Church is like the Salvation (Bible) History, in this respect: it is something human, a human thing, carrying something divine.
"But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us."
I think the Bible and the Catholic Church have some of the same scandalize-the-seminarians characteristics. And why? Because they are both real. That is to say, they are not ideal. They are not “an idea” that some very bright, very moral person cooked up out of utopian concepts, to make the kids behave. They are something better than that: they are what actually happens when you’re working with the kind of material you’re working with. Fallen, frail, futile, brutal, brilliant, scheming, striving, yearning, self-deceiving man-un-kind. Whom God loves beyond all reason, and has a will to save. Savior is His Name.
So. That’s my paradigm. I hope I have time to get back to your good particular points. It’s way past my bedtime.
We are under the Mercy, roamer_1.
Likewise. Your kindness is only exceeded by your good looks and gentle manners : ) It is really nice to be able to debate without sound and fury.
There are many serious difficulties in the field of textual criticism, as all Biblical scholars know.. [...]
I am fairly familiar with most textual problems in the Word - One of the reasons I use the KJV is because it has the convenience of insertions by the translators being italicized, and for it's reliance on the Masoretic text, which I hold to be better - But for the most part, there is little that is literally offensive to the general tenor of the message... Most conflicts are removed by a reliance upon a Hebrew mindset and an interpretation that holds the Torah to be sacrosanct within the body of the entirety. One would be surprised by what the rest CAN'T mean when one has an eye toward the preservation of the beginning things. IOW, I see most problems to be interpretive.
Something like the difference between the Priests Abiathar and Ahimelech would certainly be a curiosity for me - I think most things are purposeful, and the difference may well point to something underlying - But if I can see nothing there, it doesn't bother me to write it off as a problematic error - Not that I would ever write it off altogether...
What is more problematic is something like the Johannine Comma... Something which can obviously be considered as an insertion, as it is not present in many of the proof texts, and it leans heavily toward buttressing the concept of the trinity - Such a thing, so heavily relied upon, would be more likely to give me pause.
But your criticism here seems to be comparative - You seem to be saying I can't be critical of your tradition because the Word itself has 'mistakes' - But I would counter with the idea that even if the widest berth is given to such mistakes, there is an incredible continuity (If one takes an Hebrew perspective) to the Scriptures. That is not present in your tradition, and in fact, your tradition attempts to begin with novelty that cannot be true - And from there, novelty upon novelty - it's own internal continuity is inconsistent, and wholly without continuity to the Word, which it claims to uphold, and in fact, claims to surpass.
And finally, the signature of YHWH, the Prophecy runs through every book of the Bible. Virtually the entire Book is prophetic, and that prophetic thread is remarkably (exactly) consistent and impossibly intertwined throughout nearly every page... Something wholly absent in your tradition, not to mention to a level of intertwining sufficient to confirm that major corruption is absent.
So it occurs to me that the comparison is faulty for the reasons above. In spite of any error you might think you've found, the Bible is self-confirming, having the Word and the Prophecy in a very high state of internal agreement and entanglement (assuming the Protestant canon). Since there is no confirming Prophecy interwoven in your tradition, and since it's own internal consistency is so malformed, And finally, since it does not maintain continuity with the Word, I find any comparison to be without merit.
We are under the Mercy, roamer_1.
Indeed we are. But mercy is not license. As for me, I will try to follow the Way of my Father's house. And my example is Yeshua.
Human language is personal. Every human being has his own language, just as he has his own DNA, as measured within the margin of error. It is a product of his own invention and his own experience. Ask him to tell the same story twice and he will tell it differently each time. Jesus must have told many difference audiences the same message, and bet he did so in different words each time. If you are a musician playing the violin, the instrument never exactly repeats the tune exactly.